Ontology of emergency shared situation awareness and crisis interoperability

Abstract

The main article focus is creating of machine and human readable vocabulary describing emergencies. Vocabulary tends to solve problem of low interoperability and technological and semantic incompatibility of departmental information systems. Vocabulary is developed in the form of OWL ontology. Proposed ontology could help to establish shared situation awareness between all participants of crisis management (emergency services, medical services, police, population exposed to risk). Article describes all stages for creating such ontology, from creating high level conceptual metamodel to development of formal ontology and it evaluation in real information system prototype. Ontology depicts all phases of emergency management, from mitigation and preparedness to recovery. Developed ontology is deployed to public access and could be freely used in information systems, it could serve as semantic foundation for information exchange within 'system-of-systems'. © 2013 IEEE.